Dreamers at the Border

On Monday, thirty-six people walked north from Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, to the Laredo port of entry, in Texas, seeking political asylum. Most wore caps and gowns, and chanted a two-word refrain (“Undocumented, unafraid”), in English, as they converged on the bridge leading to the U.S. Two things were true of nearly everyone in the crowd: they were stranded in Mexico after having been deported from the U.S. or denied reëntry, and they had, at some point, attended school in the States. Many were nearing middle-school or high-school graduation when they were forced to leave—hence the commencement garb.

“These are students. That’s the kind of person in need here,” said twenty-seven-year-old Mohammad Abdollahi, the Iranian-born, Michigan-bred leader of the National Immigrant Youth Alliance, or N.I.Y.A., which coordinated the “border action.” N.I.Y.A.’s core is comprised of so-called Dreamers, immigrants who have grown up in the U.S. and consider it home, but who were born elsewhere and still lack legal papers.

What was radical about the border action was N.I.Y.A.’s attempt to make the Dreamers’ precarious status itself the basis for a claim of political asylum. The real challenge in political-asylum cases is satisfying what’s known in asylum law as the “nexus clause,” which requires asylum seekers to prove not only that they have a credible fear of violence, but also that the threat is specifically tied to their identity or political and religious beliefs. For the Dreamers, that identity is the same as the one that they have struggled to have the United States recognize. Even if they are not, legally speaking, American, that is exactly how they’re seen in Mexico, turning them into “instant targets,” said Abdollahi. They are asking for help from the country that has defined who they are.

After weeks of careful planning, and with a lawyer standing by to offer advice, the thirty-six activists presented themselves at the border crossing, hoping to be detained. That can be harder than it sounds; often, immigration authorities simply turn people away. Trying and failing to cross the border is risky, too, complicating an immigrant’s prospects for reëntry down the line.

Less than forty-eight hours after being taken into custody, seven of the thirty-six participants had been released into the U.S. The seven included minors between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, along with their parents. They are not in the clear yet—far from it. Their release only means that their asylum appeal will run its course; a vast majority of asylum claims are rejected. That said, it may be years before they make a court appearance; they had bought some time.

Carlos Spector, a prominent immigration attorney in El Paso, was floored by what N.I.Y.A. had done. “These kids,” he marvelled, “went into detention as undocumented immigrants, and came out as political refugees.” This, he felt, raised interesting tactical possibilities. “The challenge, always, is showing you belong to a specifically targeted group. And these protestors belonged to such a group from the very start of their campaign, virtually by definition.”

There is reason to have reservations about N.I.Y.A.’s asylum strategy. Some immigration lawyers worry that it is not only a newfangled use of a well-established legal channel but a questionable stretch; tried-and-true asylum requests typically involve issues of sexual orientation, religion, gender, and ethnicity. Because the government grants so few asylum claims, advocates are wary of unconventional requests that can glut the system or provoke skepticism about the broader process. And it is too early to say what the outcome—or even the solidity—of Dreamer-based claims might be. But N.I.Y.A. itself seems to be warming to the approach. What began as a last resort has turned into the centerpiece of a new mode of engagement.

“Dreamers are a new social class,” said one lawyer who has worked with the group. There may be a million Dreamers in the U.S. right now, though that number partly depends on evolving legal measures that would formalize their status. A 2012 executive order halted the deportation of Dreamers, but only for those who arrived in the U.S. before turning sixteen, have since lived here continuously for five years, and attend school, graduated from high school, or served in the military. Those who turned thirty-one before the policy was announced aren’t eligible, and, in any event, the order freezing deportations needs to be renewed after two years. (Who knows who’ll be in office then?) A national law like the once-heralded DREAM Act, which would have created a legal status and path to citizenship for young immigrants, has been more elusive still; over the past decade, bickering and brinksmanship in Congress have felled one bill after another.

Monday marked N.I.Y.A.’s second major border action. On July 19, twenty-three-year-old Marco Saavedra—a Mexican-born immigrant and Kenyon College graduate whose family owns a restaurant in the Bronx—flew to Hermosillo, in Mexico. There he joined two other Dreamers, Lulu Martínez and Lizbeth Mateo, and, a few days later, the three headed to the U.S. border to get themselves detained. Martínez, Mateo, and Saavedra were trying to save a group of six immigrants who had been marooned in Mexico, at least one of them as early as 2006. By casting their lot in with the others’, the three risked their own legal status. They were better-known in the U.S., and, as a result, could provide additional leverage for the operation, Saavedra explained to me at the time. But the three stood to lose everything by leaving the U.S.: none had the legal documents to get back in. It was a calculated gamble to force the government’s hand. Together, the group was called the Dream Nine. (Monday’s contingent is now known as the Dream Thirty.)

Even after thirty-four Congress members signed a letter to the President calling on him to grant humanitarian parole to the Dream Nine, the administration wavered. But after seventeen days in detention in Eloy, Arizona, and on the heels of a hunger strike and a political-asylum claim, the activists were released to be with their families in the U.S., pending a full asylum hearing.

As one member of the Dream Nine told an NPR interviewer, when people in Mexico ask where he’s from, he says North Carolina. “People … think, ‘Oh . . . family in the U.S. They can get a lot of money if we can kidnap them.’ ” The husband of another participant in the Dream Nine was repeatedly held up at gunpoint in Mexico, her lawyer said, with his assailants using the same logic. Among Monday’s group, several have claimed to be the victims of extortion, violence, and routine intimidation.

N.I.Y.A. is less a formal operation than a loose affiliation of individuals who feel that they have run out of alternatives. In a sense, the group is an expression of the frustration of an immigrant generation that is American in all but name—desperate for immigration reform but weaned during an era of legislative dysfunction. In another action earlier this year, N.I.Y.A. “infiltrated” a federal detention center—the group’s term for when activists deliberately get themselves detained so that they can document conditions inside and inform other detainees of their rights. Some in the pro-immigrant fold see N.I.Y.A.’s actions, at a delicate time, as too bold. (One expert at the Center for American Progress called N.I.Y.A. the “tip of the spear” of a new immigration coalition.) That yet another debate on immigration has come and gone in Congress might be seen as a vindication of N.I.Y.A.’s more radical forms of intervention, or as a loss. If Congress could broker some sort of deal on immigration reform in the near future, action on Dreamers would seem like a relatively safe, bipartisan starting point: it’s an issue ripe for rhetorical hedging (“These kids came to the U.S. through no fault of their own”) and vote scoring.

I spoke to Abdollahi on Monday night, as news trickled in about the Dream Thirty. “The problem with organizing for immigration reform,” he told me, “is that people are afraid of being deported or getting into further legal trouble. That’s understandable.” But increasingly, that fear is being eclipsed by a sense of desperation. The Obama Administration has deported 1.7 million people to date, and while Dreamers may be spared that fate for now, their families aren’t. Nearly seventeen million people in the U.S. live in “mixed-status” families, meaning that at least one relative is undocumented. “Our communities cannot wait any longer,” Marco Saavedra insisted. “My parents have not seen their mothers in over twenty years. We need to do something.”